No doubt so-called environmentalists will note with some pleasure that the last coal shipment, possibly ever, left Newcastle this week. The ship “Longwave” sailed from Port of Tyne carrying 12,000 tonnes bound for Belgium. The coal was extracted at the Fieldhouse surface mine, east of Durham, where a total of 500,000 tonnes was mined between 2018 and 2020.

Both Fieldhouse Colliery and and the nearby The Bradley Mine in County Durham have been the subject of bitter contestation by imported environmental activists who set up climate camps at both sites. The Bradley Mine in County Durham had operated for almost 200 years- but in August last year it mined its last ton of coal.

The Bradley site, which lies between Leadgate and Dipton, produced 150,000 tonnes of coal a year and employed hundreds of locals. The firm operating the mine, Banks Mining, was keen to progress plans for a small extension on land to the west of the Bradley site but in August 2020 after delays of 28 months the proposal was rejected by the Durham Council. The project would have represented an investment of £100m into the North East economy.

Speaking of the last coal shipment, a spokesman for the shipping company Hargreaves said, “Hargreaves has been slowly moving away from the coal industry and recently sold off the last of its coal stock to its German division.”

Germany, of course, is heavily dependant on coal to provide baseload power against its ever growing stock of wind turbines. So dependent is it on coal that it clears away the populations of whole towns, pulls down cathedrals and razes ancient forests, to get at it. In fact, since 1945, hundreds of villages have disappeared, victims of Germany’s growing need for coal, with 40 percent of Germany’s power coming from coal. Germany was at one time well served by nuclear power but began process of divesting from it after Green Party campaigns. The most recent victim of the search for coal is the town of Immerath which holds the key to 1.3 billion tons of lignite. The company closing down the village, RWE, Europe’s top emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2), admits lignite is cheap to produce, but harmful for the environment. Despite its huge faith in renewables Germany has consistently failed to achieve its carbon targets and has been fined by the EU.

Further up the coast from Newcastle, 3 million tonnes of coal from a new opencast mine, Highthorn could have contributed to the UK balance of payments, provided much needed jobs and prevented environmentally damaging imports. But again, due to misplaced ideological concerns the project was finally shelved after seven years of campaigning by Greenpeace.

Those same environmental activists do not seem to mind that only a few miles down the coast from Highthorn, Lynemouth Power Station has changed over from burning locally-mined coal to burning imported wood pellets. In 2020 the UK imported 475,000 tonnes of wood pellets from the US, 202,000 from Canada and even 44,000 tonnes from Brazil (presumably from the much talked about rain forests).

It long been known, but should need no explanation, that burning wood is less efficient and more environmentally harmful than burning coal. As Duncan Brack, independent environmental policy analyst and former special adviser at the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change writing about the practice in 2017 said, “It doesn’t make sense [,,.] “this idea is not credible”.

“The fact that forests have grown over the previous 20 or 100 years means they are storing large amounts of carbon, you can’t pretend it doesn’t make an impact on the atmosphere if you cut them down and burn them.”

His 2017 report on burning wood pellets in the UK explained that the assumption of carbon neutrality misses out on some crucial issues, including the fact that young trees planted as replacements absorb and store less carbon than the ones that have been burned. Another major problem is that under UN climate rules, emissions from trees are only counted when they are harvested. However the US, Canada and Russia [the countries the UK imports from] do not use this method of accounting. So, if wood pellets are imported from these countries into the EU, which doesn’t count emissions from burning, the carbon simply goes “missing”.

Burning wood pellets can release more carbon than fossil fuels like coal per unit of energy, Brack reported. I would suggest that shipping fuel half way around the world makes little sense either.

If there is a UK target for carbon emissions and a plan to achieve it, it does not make sense that a few activists can interfere with every detail of that plan. As with the Woodhouse colliery in Cumbria I have recently written about, environmental activism is overriding common sense and Woodhouse Colliery is another example of a well-supported and welcome project that has been scuppered by a small band of people who seem favour Drax Power Station, Lynemouth and others burning imported wood so long as they don’t burn local coal.

The last ton of coal to leave the port is a sad event in the history of Newcastle *. It has major significance. Coal mining has been the main driver of Newcastle’s prosperity and fame. At its peak in 1913 coal provided over 250,000 jobs and produced 56 million tonnes of coal a year, from over 400 mines. Such was Newcastle’s association with coal that the phrase “like taking coals to Newcastle” was used to mean to indulge in any stupid, illogical or contradictory activity.

Undermining UK recovery for the ideological grandstanding of groups such as Greenpeace and the scruffy supporters of The Extinction Rebellion whilst worsening our environmental impact is a stupid, illogical and contradictory activity.

* Meanwhile just down the road the Port of Tyne has announced a £1 million investment in its wood pellet-handling operations.